Now, Sim City is a game, and to be fun it has to be quick to learn, so of course it will simplify.  The problem is that these two fallacies in SIm City are also great fallaces of mid-late 20th Century urbanism.  Sim City didn’t just simplify, it simplified in the direction of the old habits of urbanist thought — habits that were already being challenged (in part by the New Urbanism) by the time the game was invented in the late 1980s. In short, Sim City could be hailed as a triumph of reactionary brainwashing — in that it instilled in a generation of 1990s teen geeks all the worst assumptions of 1960s city planning.